Contents

Jack Shephard opens his eye and dilates his pupil as he awakens in a jungle, terribly disoriented, battered and bruised. Jack is shocked and confused as he doesn’t know where he is and how he got there. Just as he is about to get up he hears a russell in the bushes. Jack turns his head to see a yellow Labrador retriever running through the bamboo. Jack attempts to gather his thoughts, finding a small bottle of vodka in his suit pocket and takes off, crashing through the branches and vegetation. He suddenly emerges onto a beach, and is confronted with the carnage of the crash of Oceanic Flight 815. Jack, a distinguished surgeon, immediately springs into action, administering medical aid and asking other survivors to assist him with more difficult rescues. In quick fashion, he rescues a man pinned under some wreckage, he assists Claire and enlists Hurley to watch her, and administers CPR to Rose, saving her life.

After the initial shock of the crash passes, Jack slips off to tend to his own minor injuries. Here he meets Kate, whom he asks to stitch a wound on his back. During their initial conversation, Kate reveals that their plane had broken apart in mid-air. Later on the beach, Jack tends to an unconscious man who has been badly hurt, while Kate curiously observes them. Other survivors, including Michael and Walt, meet to discuss what to do with the bodies in the wreckage, as an uninterested Sawyer looks on. This prompts Sayid to organize a clean-up. Hurley salvages meals from the plane's galley and distributes them to the survivors, while Shannon refuses chocolate offered by Boone, believing instead that their rescue is imminent.

That night, the peacefulness of the camp is disturbed by loud roaring noises and crashing trees emanating from the nearby jungle. In the morning, Jack decides that the survivors need to send a distress signal to have any hope of rescue, and he believes the best solution is to use the plane's transceiver, located in the cockpit of the plane. Kate claims to have seen smoke from somewhere within the jungle and asks to come with Jack to find what is hoped to be another part of the plane's wreckage. With Kate and Charlie, Jack sets off into the jungle to find the cockpit. As they move deeper into the jungle, they encounter a sudden rainstorm. When the trio finds the plane, resting against a tree, they are forced to climb through the rows of seats to reach the cabin. Inside, they find the pilot still in his seat. Charlie disappears into the bathroom while Jack and Kate find the pilot awaking with a start from a concussion. He tells them that the plane had lost radio contact six hours after take off, where it turned back for Fiji and hit turbulence. The plane was a thousand miles off course when it crashed.

Meanwhile, on the beach during the rainstorm, a group of survivors takes refuge in the wreckage. While huddled there, a young Korean man, Jin, tells his wife, Sun, that she should remain close to him at all times. Even though most of the survivors have taken shelter, John Locke remains outside and sits alone in the rain on the beach with his arms outstretched. Back in the jungle, the conversation in the cockpit is interrupted when the strange roaring noise that they had heard from the jungle the previous night returns. When the pilot investigates, he is seized by something outside, which drags him through the cockpit window. This prompts the trio to grab the transceiver and flee. During the escape, Charlie falls. Jack returns to help him, while a terrified Kate runs on. Kate stops and realizes she is alone. She yells for Jack, then becomes terrified and starts stuttering. After the entity disappears, Kate, Charlie and Jack reunite and find the pilot, his bloodied corpse suspended in a tree top.

"Well, fear's sort of an odd thing. When I was in residency my first solo procedure was a spinal surgery on a sixteen year old kid, a girl. And at the end, after thirteen hours, I was closing her up and I, I accidentally ripped her dural sac, shredded the base of the spine where all the nerves come together, membrane as thin as tissue. And so it ripped open and the nerves just spilled out of her like angel hair pasta, spinal fluid flowing out of her and I... and the terror was just so crazy. So real. And I knew I had to deal with it. So I just made a choice. I'd let the fear in, let it take over, let it do its thing, but only for five seconds, that's all I was going to give it. So I started to count: one, two, three, four, five. Then it was gone. I went back to work, sewed her up and she was fine. "

In the original script Jack was supposed to die at the end of the episode, and would have been played by Michael Keaton, however; it was decided by the writers that they didn't want to deceive the audience with this.

Greg Grunberg, who played the pilot, is a good friend of J.J. Abrams and has appeared in many of his projects.

The budget for this episode was $11 Million, making it the most expensive television pilot in history at that time.